Unlike the ordinary poetaster, Davis wrote with a mission to fulfil, with a set purpose to accomplish. He did not teach merely because he wished to sing, but he sang because he wished to teach. His poetry was to serve a purpose as distinctly within the domain of practical politics as a party pamphlet, or a speech from the hustings. If the people had hitherto depended almost exclusively for information on the spoken word of a few popular orators, how much more effective would not the good tidings of hope be, when given with rhetorical elegance, set in glorious song, and placed within purchaseable reach of all. Hitherto the genius of Melancholy presided over the fount of Irish song. The future was looked forward to with hopeless dread, or sullen recklessness. The present was only spoken of to enhance by shadowy contrast the grandeur of a golden age, that seemed to have passed away forever. Moore's poetry was the wail of a lost cause, the chronicle of a past, whose history was yet recorded throughout the country in ruined abbeys, where the torch of faith and learning was kept from dying out; in ivied castles, from which the mustered manhood of a nation's strength had gone forth to scare the Viking from her soil. Poor Mangan's vision of the past might be predicated as an ideal picture of this lamented epoch:-- "I walked entranced Through a land of morn, The sun, with wondrous excess of light, Shone down and glanced O'er seas of corn, And lustrous gardens aleft and right; Even in the clime Of resplendent Spain, Beams no such sun upon such a land; But it was the time 'Twas in the reign, Of Cáhál Mor of the Wine-red Hand."